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Along with others, I’ve spent the last four years documenting the extreme, often unprecedented, commitment to secrecy that this president has exhibited, including his vindictive war on whistleblowers, his refusal to disclose even the legal principles underpinning his claimed war powers of assassination, and his unrelenting, Bush-copying invocation of secrecy privileges to prevent courts even from deciding the legality of his conduct (as a 2009 headline on the Obama-friendly TPM site put it: “Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets”). Just this week, the Associated Press conducted a study proving that last year, the Obama administration has rejected more FOIA requests on national security grounds than in any year since Obama became president, and quoted Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project, as follows: “We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the number of claims to protect secret law, the government’s interpretations of laws or its understanding

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Thousands of black plastic bags filled with Jewish religious artifacts line a dirt road in the woods near where Larry Simons lives. Nearby, 10 tractor-trailers sit filled with the bags, recently unearthed from their burial ground. The bags are part of an Orthodox Jewish custom known as shaimos, where Jewish books and other sacred objects that are no longer of use must be buried. “The whole thing troubles me because, one, I am Jewish,” the 76-year-old Simons said, as he walked passed the piles of bags. “As a Jewish person, I do not like to be denigrated. But when (I see) what I perceive as an abuse … of the law, it bothers me.” What concerns Simons, and the state Department of Environmental Protection, is that these bags were buried illegally in the woods in Jackson and Lakewood. A state Superior Court judge ordered the rabbi overseeing the site, Chaim Abadi, to remove the bags. But nearly a year later, Abadi is still searching for a new location for the artifacts

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The prosecution alleges that, at a football party last summer, the West Virginia girl who multiple witnesses have described as incapacitated to the point of incoherence and unconsciousness lay shirtless on a yard, vomiting, while a group of guys offered $3 to piss on her. Next, she was allegedly sexually assaulted multiple times, ranging from digital penetration to attempted oral rape. Photographs taken during the assault, as well as a video in which a witness described the “dead girl” as “so raped,” were distributed throughout the town. As Jane Doe tried to learn what happened to her, the boys shared their alleged sexual assault with each other through texts and e-mails. “Hey buddy…you want to send me that pic because you love me?” one boy texted Mays, while Jane’s Doe friend commented about the same photo, “If that is [semen] on you that is [expletive] crazy.”

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Your _LIVESON twitter account is created – it will keep tweeting even after you’ve passed away. _LIVESON A.I. analyses your main twitter feed. Learning about your likes, tastes, syntax. Tweets begin to populate your _LIVESON feed. Help it become a better you by giving feedback. Nominate an executor to your _LIVESON ‘Will’. They can decide to keep your account ‘live’.

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data have different valences; data are always mediated. They must be contextualized by an interpretive community — pieces of data don’t automatically dictate how they must be interpreted by anyone who sees it. They are available to be put to whatever use by those with the authority to contextualize them. And more data doesn’t automatically make for a clearer picture. It just makes for more interpretative work, more exercises of power by the interpreters, more occasions where power might need to be resisted. In other words, data are not inherently a weapon against power, as transparency advocates sometimes seem to suggest; they are also a tool of power. A reputation is constituted by who gets to interpret data and for what reasons; it is determined by power relations. Amassing more data won’t somehow undo the hierarchy; it just gives people in the position to impose social judgments more information to rationalize their prejudices and protect their privileges.

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For the first time, NSA chief and head of the U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Keith Alexander admitted America is ready to attack in cyberspace. Never before has a U.S. official acknowledged that the U.S. government is working on or is in possession of malware capable of attacking a foreign nation in a cyber conflict, despite the fact that at least one attack — the famous Stuxnext worm — has been attributed to the U.S. On Wednesday, in his annual testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Alexander took the cyberwar rethoric coming out of Washington up a notch. “I would like to be clear that this team, this defend-the-nation team, is not a defensive team,” he said. “This is an offensive team.” In other words, this cyber army is ready to retaliate in case of a cyber attack against the United States.

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Big Sugar has spent decades paying its way into politicians’ hearts, demanding price controls and tariffs that boost profits and artificially inflate sugar prices, and using its political clout to establish a permanent life-support mechanism for an industry whose major product is causing many Americans to die.

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A scandal in a Massachusetts crime lab continues to reverberate throughout the state’s legal system. Several months ago, Annie Dookhan, a former chemist in a state crime lab, told police that she messed up big time. Dookhan now stands accused of falsifying test results in as many as 34,000 cases. As a result, lawyers, prosecutors and judges used to operating in a world of “beyond a reasonable doubt” now have nothing but doubt. Already, hundreds of convicts and defendants have been released because of the scandal. Now, the state’s highest court may weigh in on how these cases should be handled. “I don’t think anyone ever perceived that one person was capable of causing this much chaos,” says Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrisey, one of many DAs now digging through old drug cases, trying to sort out how many should now be considered tainted.

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Femen activists appeared amidst the demonstrators wearing costumes of sexy nuns. The activists were topless as usual, with slogans written across their chests. They were spraying demonstrators with white liquid calling it “Jesus’ semen.”

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In Albania, 750,000 Communist-era bunkers populate the landscape, relics of the paranoia and skewed priorities of former dictator Enver Hoxha. Now they exist as quirky homes, animal shelters, ad hoc storage and make-out spots. The peculiar program of bunkerization, which lasted Hoxha’s entire 40-year rule, resulted in one bunker for every four citizens.

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The 40-year-old Brasfield was with his girlfriend, Shaquina Baxter, in the parking lot of a Motel 6 on Dania Beach Boulevard when he released the 12 shiny, red and silver mylar balloons into the sky and watched them float away in the Sunday morning breeze. But the trooper saw nothing more than probable cause for a crime against the environment. Apparently, lawmakers in the Sunshine State think it’s appropriate to treat what should have been, at most, simple littering (to which courts would have issued a fine, maybe?), into a major crime against Mother Nature. As if Florida jails weren’t full enough. The trooper arrested Brasfield and charged him with polluting to harm humans, animals, plants and everything else living under the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act. “Endangered marine turtle species and birds, such as wood storks and brown pelicans, seek refuge in John U. Lloyd State Park, about 1.5 miles east of the motel,” said the paper.

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Thaune Nunes Ferreira, 29, was arrested on Sunday for using prosthetic fingers to fool the biometric employee attendance device used at the hospital where she works near Sao Paulo. She is accused of covering up the absence of six colleagues.

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Facebook users are unwittingly revealing intimate secrets – including their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs – using only public “like” updates, according to a study of online privacy. The research into 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. Researchers were able to accurately infer a Facebook user’s race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality or political views using only a record of the subjects and items they had “liked” on Facebook – even if users had chosen not to reveal that information. The study will reopen the debate about privacy in the digital age and raise fresh concerns about what information people share online.

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Beyond this, we need to examine the culture of incarceration responsible for keeping a substantial portion of the U.S. population imprisoned under what can only be deemed inhumane conditions. Current U.S. policies regarding solitary confinement are controversial not only considering definitions of torture under international law but also in light of our own Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. As Senator Dick Durbin urged in his June 19, 2012 appeal to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (PDF), the stakes are high: More than 80,000 inmates are currently held in isolation in so-called Security Housing Units (SHUs), according to a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics census. They are locked up for as long as 23 hours a day in small single cells, without windows or direct access to natural light, and without meaningful activities of any kind. What does our ongoing tolerance of this practice say about us as a society?

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“Man I feel dirty looking at these pics,” wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums, one of the top “aboveground” hacking discussion sites on the Internet (it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female “slaves” surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women’s own webcams. “Poor people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea they are the laughing stock on HackForums,” he continued. “It would be funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes across this thread.” Whether this would in fact be “funny” is unlikely. RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people’s private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising.

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The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai’s main river has doubled in two days to nearly 6,000, the government said, as residents worried over the water supply questioned the handling of the incident. Shanghai had pulled 5,916 dead pigs out of the Huangpu river, which cuts through China’s commercial hub and supplies 22 percent of its water, since Saturday, the local government said in a statement late Tuesday. The number of pigs taken out of the river—believed to have been dumped by farmers upstream after dying of disease—had started to fall on a daily basis, it added, and water quality was within national standards.

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The Louisiana voucher schools under GOP Governor Bobby Jindal had already gotten into trouble last year for using a variety of religious right schoolbooks that teach a number of crazy, and racist, theories, including: The Ku Klux Klan was a force for good “[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001 Majority of slaves in the old south were treated well “A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

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A New York town that began assigning an armed police officer to guard a high school in the wake of the Connecticut massacre has suspended the program after an officer accidentally discharged his pistol in a hallway while classes were in session. Lt. James Janso of the Lloyd police department tells media outlets Officer Sean McCutcheon will be suspended while an investigation continues.

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In the latest incident of anti-gun hysteria to erupt in a school setting, officials at an elementary school in small-town Michigan impounded a third-grader boy’s batch of 30 homemade birthday cupcakes because they were adorned with green plastic figurines representing World War Two soldiers. The school principal branded the military-themed cupcakes “insensitive” in light of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, reports Fox News Radio. “It disgusted me,” Casey Fountain, the boy’s father, told Fox News. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

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Chilling Final Photos of Murder Victims Taken by Their Killers

Many serial killers take photos of their victims–both dead and alive–to keep a record of their work, to refer to later for self-pleasure, and sometimes to taunt police. Here are a few images taken by serial killers of their victims while they were still alive. Most know they’re doomed, others are still unaware of what’s to come.

Allow your eyes to scroll down the page to imbibe this unique New York Times Home section. After a little observation, I concluded that the presentation applies established formulas for inserting subliminal messages into an innocuous scene. In reading the text of the article, I searched in vain for any reference to the subject matter of the picture that appears centrally above the couch-bed, above the fold, on the first page of this presumably wholesome section of the newspaper that proudly proclaims it prints only the news that is “fit to print.” In the case of this article, the Times editors seem to have ignored their motto, exposing their reading public to a media presentation with a concealed agenda and precious little news value. While the centrally located picture begs for our attention, the text of the article directs our eyes to the pattern on the fabric wallpaper, to the furniture barely visible at the extreme left of the photograph, indeed, to anything but the picture….

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Born in Mexico in 1834, Julia Pastrana was an indigenous woman living with two very rare diseases: generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which covered her body and face in thick hair, and gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums. She took part in 19th-century exhibition tours throughout Europe, where she entertained people with her bear-like features. Her life story is both sad and fascinating. In 1859, Pastrana became pregnant after marrying Theodore Lent, an impresario who was traveling at freak shows with her across Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, her infant son also inherited her hypertichosis and passed mere hours after his birth in Moscow. Pastrana also died after a few days from severe complications. Following the death of both his wife and son, Lent embalmed their bodies and began exhibiting them while on tour. Lent also remarried after meeting a bearded woman in Germany, whom was later billed as Pastrana’s sister, Zenora.

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There is no goofier Hollywood invention than the Flamboyant Killer. Whether you were raised on the Friday the 13th movies or Saw-type torture porn, they all have a slapstick quality that lets you know that in the real world, people like this just don’t exist. Real killers are, of course, much stranger.

FRONTLINE investigates why Wall Street’s leaders have escaped prosecution for any fraud related to the sale of bad mortgages.

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And I’ll just say here, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night. Every single individual associated with this. I just, I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

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“There was a guy there, a well-dressed guy, standing next to a car that had a vanity plate,” he said. “And the plate read, ‘FUND’EM.'” Winston, curious, asked the guy what the plate meant. The man laughed and said, “That’s Angelo Mozilo’s growth strategy for 2006.” Here’s how Winston described the rest of the story to PBS – i.e. what happened when he asked the man to elaborate: “What if the person doesn’t have a job?” “Fund ’em,” the – the guy said. And I said, “What if he has no income?” “Fund ’em.” “What if he has no assets?” And he said, “Fund ’em.” Later on, Winston would hear that the company’s unofficial policy was that if a loan applicant could “fog a mirror,” he would be given a loan. This kind of information is absolutely crucial to understanding what caused the subprime crisis. There are people out there still willing to argue that the government somehow “forced the banks to lend” to unworthy applicants. In reality, it was unscrupulous companies like Countrywide …

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Then Christine stumbled upon a controversial homemade herbal remedy that she credits with enormously improving her dog’s quality of life. She’s grateful that, in his final year, Sampson weighed in at a robust 106 pounds and lived free of the wracking pain that had haunted him. Whereas before Sampson had been too weak to walk, almost overnight he became a born-again youngster. “He was a puppy again, happy and playful,” Christine recalls. “He’d trot around the house with his toys in his mouth, wanting to play fetch!” The name of the controversial herbal remedy Sampson took? Cannabis. Inspired by reports of medical marijuana helping human cancer patients, Christine started digging online. The search terms? “How to administer cannabis to a dog.” Christine — who, for the record, is not a recreational cannabis user — was initially concerned about giving it to her dog because of the bad press she’d heard about the plant. But after giving Sampson cannabis flower-bud material mixed with…

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When George Palmer Putnam went to the War Department to secure photographs for “The Horror of It,” a little volume containing stark pictures of the war, which has just been published, Major General Carr of the Signal Corps refused to show him any pictures showing war’s gruesome results. “Only those photographs showing the pleasant aspects of war can be released,” the General said. “The Department has a moral obligation to the Gold Star Mothers.”

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Advances in bioengineering have been able to produce meat analogs, but the process has always been stupendously expensive, and the results were only passable. It turns out that it’s actually very difficult to match the taste and texture of animal muscle tissue by growing cells in the lab. The marbling of fats and connective tissue is integral to the experience of eating a burger. Applying 3D printing to artificial meats could be the answer, according to Forgacs. If you take tissue engineering and add in some 3D printing, you get the burgeoning field of bioprinting. Researchers are working with cell aggregates as the medium in bioprinting (as opposed to plastics in regular 3D printing). Layer after layer of cells can be laid down to more closely resemble the genuine article. Researchers can basically build a block of muscle that never lived.

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So with Monsanto products themselves amongst the key suspects in Colony Collapse Disorder, one might ask: Why has the multinational bought a company which has been a key player in researching this disorder as well as Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, another scourge of bees? “We’re absolutely committed to Beeologics’ existing work,” said Monsanto spokesperson Kelly Powers. Yet one has to wonder if owning a firm dedicated to shedding light on the trouble with bees might not serve Monsanto’s interest in allowing it to further cover up their own corporate complicity in the problem. Let us hope that Monsanto is as good as its word and uses this newly acquired company to boldly get to the bottom of the mystery of the disappearing bees. But if history is any guide, there is little cause for optimism. The health watchdog group “Natural Society” rated Monsanto “the worst in 2011 for its ongoing work to threaten human health and the environment.”

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Police and prosecutors said Long was at McAloon’s Alameda Street apartment at a party McAloon was throwing for a 13-year-old relative and that teen’s friends. Ashley inhaled helium from a tank with the intent to make her voice higher-pitched, and collapsed after an air bubble entered her blood stream and blocked blood flow.

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Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade. They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

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There’s a set of photos making the rounds on the Internet these days, but even though they recently went viral, they were actually released a year ago. They show a bunch of normal-looking walnuts that when cracked open reveal a very hard filling – concrete pebbles. According to Ministry of Tofu, these fake walnuts were bought by a certain Mr. Li, last February, from a street vendor in Zhengzou, Henan province. When he got home and started cracking them, he noticed that instead of a meaty seed, many were actually filled with concrete pebbles wrapped in tissue. But Li’s case is not an isolated one. Apparently, many Chinese walnut vendors try to maximize their profits by carefully cracking open the hard shell, taking out the nutmeat, replacing it with concrete and tissue so it doesn’t make a strange noise, and gluing it shut. This way they can sell the nuts and the seeds separately.

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So it would’ve cost more than $211,000, and that’s before ResultSource’s fee, which is typically more than $20,000. Kaplan settled for making the Journal’s list, reaching the pre-sale figure of 3,000 by securing commitments from corporate clients, who agreed to buy copies as part of his speaking fees, and by buying copies for himself to resell at public appearances. Kaplan expresses significant reservations about taking part in what is essentially a laundering operation aimed at deceiving the book-buying public into believing a title is more in-demand than it is. “It’s no wonder few people in the industry want to talk about bestseller campaigns,” he writes “Put bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to buy their way onto bestseller lists.”

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I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC’s How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster’s vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive. “It’s difficult to describe to people… how much material was suddenly available,” the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: “There was no ramp up. There was no transition. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a b…

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The US Library of Congress welcomed Moby Dick onto its vaunted shelves this week but it wasn’t the famous Herman Melville-penned whale tale version oh no, it was the version told exclusively in emoticon – you know those little signs like J, ;). Emoji are the emoticons typically used in Japanese texting though they obviously are used world-wide to annoy or entertain everyone depending on your opinion of them. Called “Emoji Dick,” the emoticon book project was undertaken back in 2009 by data engineer Fred Benenson. According to the Library of Congress’ blog, in 2009 Benenson started a campaign to fund the “Emoji Dick” project and within a month raised enough money to put it together – $3,500.

Fans sprayed with debris. Someone got mashed by a tire. NASCAR tried to take this down.

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According to Las Vegas Metro Police, an officer was patrolling the 300 block of N. 16th st. Tuesday when he came across a naked woman who appeared to be engaged in sexual relations with a dog. Officers arrived on the scene to find the woman, who was still undressed, laying on the ground. When the woman saw officers approaching, she said “Hi” to them and then began fondling the dog in a sexual manner.

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CNN may have just posted their best piece of investigative journalism in years. In the following video, three drivers of varying ages got incredibly high on marijuana and test-drove cars around a course. A driving-ed instructor accompanied them to avert any chance of an accident, and police watched from the sidelines to spot any visible ‘signs’ of inebriation in their movements.

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Remember that Higgs-like particle that scientists finally managed to pin down last year at the Large Hadron Collider? Well, it’s proving to be a harbinger of bad news. According to Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the mass of the Higgs boson indicates that “the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out.”

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I love this. I know that the comments are going to be filled with people decrying the destructive aspects of ‘Gallon Smashing,’ and they’re not wrong, but there’s so much that’s great about this concept. There’s a level of straight up slapstick comedy that is incredible. This kid (is it the same kid every time? I think it might be) has the moves of a silent comedy star. I like that the prank isn’t necessarily about getting other people wet or anything (although that happens, as is the unpredictable nature of smashing gallons of milk). And I like that this guy seems to be in his teens – exactly the right age to be doing stupid, destructive, anti-social prank behavior. When frat boys start doing this it won’t be funny.

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The list of 10 tips by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs was billed as “last resort” options to deter a sexual assault. “Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating,” read one tip. “Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone,” read another.

Thanks Jasmine

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For example, the following actions may get an American citizen living on U.S. soil labeled as a “suspected terrorist” today: Being young (if you live near a battle zone, you are fair game; and see this) Using social media Reporting or doing journalism Speaking out against government policies Protesting anything (such as participating in the “Occupy” movement) Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this) Criticizing the government’s targeting of innocent civilians with drones (although killing innocent civilians with drones is one of the main things which increases terrorism. And see this) Asking questions about pollution (even at a public Congressional hearing?) Paying cash at an Internet cafe Asking questions about Wall Street shenanigans Holding gold Creating alternative currencies Stocking up on more than 7 days of food (even though all Mormons are taught to stockpile food, and most …

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Earlier this month, “revenge porn” entrepreneur Craig Brittain sat for an on-camera interview with CBS4-Denver, where he explained how his website IsAnybodyDown is nothing more than “entertainment.” Brittain’s site shows nude pictures of people, mostly women, without their consent, along with their personal contact info. The website advertises links to a service called “Takedown Hammer” which promises to get victims off the site if they pay $250. Many assume the “Hammer” is Brittain, since its e-mails come from the same IP address; Brittain denies it. In any case, to many of the victims, Brittain’s site looks like a simple extortion scheme.

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Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times. The United States of America. All seemingly hacked by the Chinese. China. Seemingly hacked by the US. Big time. But is there another option? “At least 40 companies including Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were targeted in malware attacks linked to an Eastern European gang of hackers that is trying steal company secrets, two people familiar with the matter said.” Bloomberg Chinese-hackers According to Tom Kellerman of Trend Micro there could well be – “We’ve all been watching China, but they’re not the most advanced cybercriminals. The most advanced are from the Eastern Bloc and Russia.” Tom Kellerman via CNN

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A protest staged by dairy farmers in Brussels has entered its second day. Farmers sprayed thousands of litres of fresh milk at the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday in protest at what they say are excessive milk quotas and prices below the cost of production.

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The testimony at the hearing made it very clear that airport security is only as strong as its weakest link. This seems self-evident. Yet, despite all the money and manpower wasted on airport security theater in this country and around the world, perimeter security remains so lax that a guy with a costume and some bolt cutters can make a hole large enough to drive a van through. This is great news for heist fans, to be sure. But it’s pretty alarming for everyone else.

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All disruptive technologies upset traditional power balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it empowers the powerless, but that’s only half the story. The Internet empowers everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power, but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet, they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating the future we want to live in, and the role of information technology in enabling that world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures and not society in general.

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Porn legend Ron Jeremy, 59, has been released from hospital after a near-death experience and he’s already planning on getting back to business. Doctors have told the prolific star that he’s cleared to have sex after he left Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles around week ago.

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“I had a sinking felling because my porn collection is valuable, man,” Johnson told WZZM 13. Johnson collects rare performances by black adult film stars that were difficult for him to find and impossible to replace. He says the stolen pornography collection is worth $7,500, much more than the televisions that were taken. “I had a collection that had every African American that’s ever been in porn, from the 70s up until now,” explained Johnson. “My collection was the best in Michigan– a guy in Connecticut told me that,” said Johnson. He believes the thieves realized the value when they stumbled on the porn. “They came upon it and looked at the titles and realized what they had ran across… and realized people will pay cash money for them DVDs.” Johnson says his rare footage can’t be found on the internet. “I trade and I collect and I look at them too. I ain’t got no problem with that,” said Johnson.

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The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

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Starting next week, most U.S. Internet users will be subject to a new copyright enforcement system that could slow the Internet to a crawl and force violators to take educational courses. A source with direct knowledge of the Copyright Alert System (CAS), who asked not to be named, has told the Daily Dot that the five participating Internet service providers (ISPs) will start the controversial program Monday. The ISPs—industry giants AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon—will launch their versions of the CAS on different days throughout the week. Comcast is expected to be the first, on Monday.

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Now, people are being warned about another risk of finding love in the online world – webcam extortion. Webcam extortion. Image from ShutterstockBut it’s not the familiar headline of perverted hackers blackmailing young women into stripping in front of the camera. This time the tables have turned, and it’s *men* who are being victimised by *women*, in a peculiar twist on traditional webcam extortion. Singapore’s Police Force has warned of femme fatales befriending potential victims on sites such as Facebook and Tagged.com. The women enter steamy webcam conversations with their prey, where they strip and encourage their male victim to do the same. What the man doesn’t realise, as he feverishly rips his clothes off and agrees to engage in various sexual acts in front of the camera, is that his female love interest is secretly recording everything that’s going on. The male victim is then blackmailed for money by the woman who threatens to circulate the compromising photographs

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Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process. Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants” as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched. The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier. It allows police to point a cell phone signal into all the houses in a particular neighborhood, searching for one target while sucking up everyone else’s location along with it. With one search the police could potentially invade count…

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“Slave Labor (Bunting Boy),” a 2012 work by the mysterious British graffiti artist Banksy, has vanished from a wall outside a discount store in London, and turned up at an auction house in Miami. And the town council in Haringey, the north London borough where the Banksy work appeared last May and disappeared last week, say that they want the piece returned. The stenciled piece, which shows a young boy at an old fashioned sewing machine creating a string of Union Jacks – the flags are in bright red, white and blue; the rest of the picture is in black, white, grey and sepia – appeared last year during the celebrations commemorating Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years on the throne. It was taken as an acerbic social comment, as most of Banksy’s works are, and has been regarded as a cultural attraction in the Turnpike Lane neighborhood where it stood.

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Wow, is this a crazy media frenzy. We should know better. These attacks happen all the time, and just because the media is reporting about them with greater frequency doesn’t mean that they’re happening with greater frequency. Hype aside, the Mandiant report on the hackers is very good, especially the part where the Chinese hackers outted themselves through poor opsec: they logged into Facebook from their work computers. But this is not cyberwar. This is not war of any kind. This is espionage, and the difference is important. Calling it war just feeds our fears and fuels the cyberwar arms race.

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JSAN is a writing style anonymization framework. It consists of two parts: JStylo and Anonymouth. JStylo is a standalone platform for authorship attribution. It is used as an underlying feature extraction and authorship attribution engine. Anonymouth is the writing style anonymization platform. It uses the extracted stylometric features and classification results obtained through JStylo and suggests users changes to anonymize their writing style.

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It’s been used to question or confirm the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey and St Paul’s letters for hundreds of years. Now the science of stylometry could be used in the fight against hackers, trolls and malware writers that wreak havoc on the web. At the same time, stylometry – the analysis of a person’s unique writing style – could also be used by employers to identify whistleblowers or whingers among their staff. What you say online could be traced back to you using stylometry. “Your writing style can give you away and on the internet anonymity is difficult to achieve,” say the US researchers who have developed online tools to analyse writing. Advertisement The researchers, from Drexel University in Philadelphia, studied the leaked conversations and contributions of hundreds of anonymous users in underground online forums. They were able to identify 80 per cent of users using stylometric analysis to match writing styles to authors.

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Barnacles are known for having very long penises. National Geographic reported in 2008: To cope with changing tides and a sedentary lifestyle, the gnarly crustaceans have evolved penises that are eight times the length of their bodies—the longest relative to body size of any animal. My sedentary lifestyle has had no such effect. I feel cheated. That article also noted that barnacles have the ability to change the size and shape of their penises to suit their living conditions. Barnacles living in gentle waters have long, thin penises best equipped for maximum reach, the study found. But those animals living in rough waters have shorter, stouter penises that are better able to withstand strong waves. […] The researchers also transplanted barnacles living in gentle waters to rough waters and vice versa, to make sure the penis variations they observed were a result of the environment and not due to genetic differences. The results showed that barnacles coul…

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Facebook OAuth is used to communicate between Applications & Facebook users, to grant additional permissions to your favorite apps. To make this possible, users have to ‘allow or accept’ the application request so that app can access your account information with required permissions. As a normal Facebook user we always think that it is better than entering your Facebook credentials, we can just allow specific permissions to an app in order to make it work with your account.

More than 200 years of disease and death transmitted through metzitzah b’peh, the direct mouth-to-genital suction done by mohels to the bleeding just-circumcised-penises of baby boys.

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The document includes advice such as “hide under thick trees” (believed to be bin Laden’s contribution), and instructions for setting up a “fake gathering” using dolls to “mislead the enemy”. Found by the Associated Press in a building in Timbuktu, the ancient city occupied by Islamists last year, the document is believed to have been abandoned as extremists fled a French military intervention last month. It is a Xeroxed copy of a tipsheet authored by a Yemeni extremist that has been published on some jihadi forums, but that has made little appearance in English. The list reflects how al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghbreb anticipated a military intervention that would make use of drones, as the war on terror shifts from the ground to the air.

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Devotees talk about ayahuasca’s cathartic and life-changing power, but there is a dark side to the tourism boom as well. With money rolling in and lodges popping up across Peru’s sprawling Amazon, a new breed of shaman has emerged – and not all of them can be trusted with the powerful drug. Deaths like Nolan’s are uncommon, but reports of molestation, rape, and negligence at the hands of predatory and inept shamans are not. In the past few years alone, a young German woman was allegedly raped and beaten by two men who had administered ayahuasca to her, two French citizens died while staying at ayahuasca lodges, and stories persist about unwanted sexual advances and people losing their marbles after being given overly potent doses.

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What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

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Human Bones Found in Altar Bought on eBay

Police said they were pursuing a trespasser when they spotted bones atop the outdoor altar. Steer horns and other animal bones were visible, along with the human bones, candles and incense. “The religious aspect of the case is not our focus–it’s the bones,” said Pasadena Police Lt. Ed Calatayud. Human skulls indeed are listed for sale on eBay. On Monday, for example, one described as suitable for dental study was listed at $710. Jose said his sister practices Palo Mayombe, an offshoot of Santeria.

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For about 25 years, he worked as an OB/GYN at a medical center affiliated with Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Now, Johns Hopkins and Baltimore police say Dr. Nikita Levy illegally photographed his patients, and possibly others, without their knowledge. Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi says, “One of the cameras that we can confirm is a pen camera. And there are other types that we don’t want to get into – again given the sensitive, sensitivity of the investigation. There were multiple cameras. I really can’t get into a number.”

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You, like everyone else who is alive and breathing, can be arrested right now by the U.S. federal government, charged with felony possession, then proven “guilty” of that possession because you do possess a Schedule I substance in your own brain. What substance is that? Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, sometimes called the “spirit molecule” because of its ability to allow humans to transcend states of consciousness. U.S. federal code, defines Schedule I drugs as: “Unless specifically excepted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of the following hallucinogenic substances:” (1) 3,4-methylenedioxy amphetamine. (2) 5-methoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy amphetamine. (3) 3,4,5-trimethoxy amphetamine. (4) Bufotenine. (5) Diethyltryptamine. (6) Dimethyltryptamine. (DMT) (7) 4-methyl-2,5-diamethoxyamphetamine. (8) Ibogaine. (9) Lysergic acid diethylamide. (10) Marihuana. (11) Mescaline. (12) Peyote. (13) N-ethyl-3-piperidyl…

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The Miami Beach patrolman yearned for the ultimate score, his friends told investigators: to engineer an epic drug deal, one that would make him rich and allow him to leave law enforcement behind. They called it the “Coke Dream.” That dream is dead now, as may be Navarro’s police career. He was suspended last September without pay after being charged with racketeering and fraud in connection with a scheme to use phony paperwork to acquire luxury cars. But that might be just the beginning of Navarro’s troubles. Although for now he hasn’t been charged with anything else, the investigation into his actions has produced reams of damning documents detailing bungled trips to the Bahamas to buy kilos of coke, the rip-off of a suspected marijuana grow house, drunken brawls, a botched attempt to collect a drug debt and — perhaps most strikingly — his penchant for lending his police car, uniforms and other gear to meth-dealer pals.

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Party animals could soon be able to sober up in an instant just by popping a pill. Researchers have developed a cocktail of alcohol metabolizing enzymes that speedily reduces blood alcohol levels in drunk mice. The treatment, which has been compared to having ‘millions of liver cells inside your stomach,’ could have far-reaching implications for drinkers.

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So there were 8 hours a day of group or watching videos or lectures— and that has been found to be among the least effective treatments for alcohol problems. I really didn’t expect that much seat time. I visited outpatient treatment as well and some of those have no individual [sessions] at all or it is ‘as needed’ and even less than in the residential treatment. One of the things I found myself thinking as I was sitting in those programs was, ‘Whoever came up with a model where you take addicts and they are sitting for three hours or more three times a week or longer in group based treatment, talking about the program?’ That’s an awfully long time to just sit on your butt. I would ask, ‘Is there any evidence that this is effective?’ and no one could answer where it came from.

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Scientists at Swansea and Milan Universities have found that young people who use the Internet for excessively-long periods can suffer similar withdrawal symptoms to substance mis-users. In a study of Internet users, published online in the international journal PLOS ONE, Professor Phil Reed of Swansea University’s Psychology Department and Dr Lisa A Osborne of the University’s College of Medicine and Professor Roberto Truzoli and Michela Romano of the Università degli Studi in Milan, reported the results of the first study into the immediate negative psychological impacts of Internet use. Their research found that those who engage in long periods of use reported increased negative moods after they stopped surfing the net, possibly triggering them to re-engage in net use to remove these unpleasant feelings.

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China considered using a drone strike in a mountainous region of Southeast Asia to kill a Myanmar drug lord wanted in the murders of 13 Chinese sailors, but decided instead to capture him alive, according to an influential state-run newspaper.

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Trust salmon, maybe red snapper, but not canned tuna. These are the lessons a nervous seafood eater could glean from a new study by the marine-life advocacy group Oceana. A whopping 87 percent of red snapper and 84 percent of canned “white” tuna tested was found to be mislabeled, the study found.

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He said: ‘I remember that the police put a towel on my face so I could not see. They kept telling me I was going to die. I was so scared. ‘Once I had been knocked to the ground, the police picked me up and put me on the bed. They pulled down my trousers, spread my legs and started to electrocute my testicles. It was unbelievably painful. I was so scared. ‘Then they took off the towel and I could see there was a gun pointed at my head. I started to believe I was going to die in that room.’ Further torture took place in the desert, it was claimed, where the men were initially taken.

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you would have no way of knowing, but drug dealers have moved in and are running multimillion-dollar heroin operations in some of the area’s upscale neighborhoods. You, yourself, could be living right next to the new heroin house. “You never know what might be next door to you,” New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said.

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He said last night: “I was acting like a madman. I thought I was doomed. I thought I was going to die. “I picked my daughter up and she felt incredibly light, like a grain of rice. I suddenly had this compulsion to jump through a window. “My wife ran out and got my friends who had to restrain me.” He even began impersonating Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks routine. He was rushed to hospital and doctors said his drink was almost certainly spiked with LSD. Ben reported it to police.

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It’s the number one topic for internet searches, but do we ever consider how pornography can have lasting neuroplastic effects? Discover the hard science behind the ‘porn epidemic’ – the internet’s drug of choice.

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On Monday, an American cybersecurity firm called Mandiant released a report accusing the Chinese government of systematically hacking into American computer networks and targeting state secrets, weapons programs, businesses, and even the nation’s gas pipelines. The New York Times vetted the story and concluded that a growing body of evidence “leaves little doubt” that these attacks are originating from a secret Chinese army base. Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (an organization that, in the past, has also been targeted by hackers that appeared to be China-based), tells Mother Jones that this “raises the pressure on the increasing drum beat on the US to do something.” So just how freaked out do you need to be?

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The bill, called the Internet Posting Removal Act, is sponsored by Illinois state Sen. Ira Silverstein. It states that a “web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.” The Democratic lawmaker’s bill, which does not ask for or clarify requirements from entities requesting the comment removal, would take effect 90 days after becoming law. Pseudonymous and anonymous comments have long been a critical part of U.S. public discourse, though, and the bill may be on shaky legal ground.

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The bill, called the Internet Posting Removal Act, is sponsored by Illinois state Sen. Ira Silverstein. It states that a “web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.” The Democratic lawmaker’s bill, which does not ask for or clarify requirements from entities requesting the comment removal, would take effect 90 days after becoming law. Pseudonymous and anonymous comments have long been a critical part of U.S. public discourse, though, and the bill may be on shaky legal ground.

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If you smoke marijuana in California, there’s a chance you may have to wait a week or more before you can drive legally. A bill introduced last week by state Senator Lou Correa, a Democrat from Anaheim, would make it illegal to get behind the wheel if your blood contains “any detectable amount” of cannabis—a drug which, unlike alcohol, can persist in the blood of its users for a week or more after the psychoactive effects have worn off. “This bill would effectively outlaw EVERY driver who has within recent hours or days used marijuana,” California NORML director Dale Gieringer told the East Bay Express. Strict traffic laws are fast becoming the new front of the war on drugs. Ten states already impose zero tolerance requirements on pot smokers who get behind the wheel. Another four, including Washington, where pot is now legal, set a blood limit for THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, at a level low enough to convict some drivers who aren’t actually stoned.

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A Swedish court has ruled that a 28-year-old man who ripped off his girlfriend’s trousers and underwear to perform an “infidelity check” is not guilty of rape or any other sex crimes. The man had previously been convicted of rape by a lower court after he tore off his girlfriend’s clothes and forced his fingers into her genitals on suspicion that she had been unfaithful, legal trade publication Dagens Juridik reported. The lower court had also convicted the man of several other charges related to repeated assaults and threats directed against girlfriend in a relationship that had been marked by jealousy and suspicion. But upon reviewing the case, the Svea Court of Appeal threw out the rape conviction, arguing that the man’s actions weren’t sexual in nature. Both the man and his girlfriend testified that the act was an attempt to ascertain whether or not the woman had engaged in sexual activity with another man.

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A Whole Foods supermarket in New York has removed a sign that used a drawing of President Barack Obama to advertise a sale on chicken after complaints that the ad was offensive. The sign outside the supermarket on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, featuring an apparent caricature of Obama advertising an upcoming sale on whole organic chickens, outraged neighbor Woody Henderson. “There are certain things that have been used to put down black people — watermelon, fried chicken,” he said.

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But that’s when things quickly went in the wrong direction “Suddenly she stepped to the front of the group threw off her coat and stripped from the waist up,” said Lesko. Within seconds staff at the academy rushed the stage and the district says they ushered Meaders to the side and shielded her from the students while they waited for police. Looking back – Lesko says she wasn’t acting out of the ordinary before deciding she needed to shed some layers of clothing. “No behavior that anyone encountered during the assembly and she spent the time talking to the principal having perfectly normal conversation.” She was charged with seven counts of Endangering the Welfare of a Child and one count of Public Lewdness.

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Leading Geneticist: Human Intelligence is Slowly Declining

Would you be surprised to hear that the human race is slowly becoming dumber, and dumber? Despite our advancements over the last tens or even hundreds of years, some ‘experts’ believe that humans are losing cognitive capabilities and becoming more emotionally unstable. One Stanford University researcher and geneticist, Dr. Gerald Crabtree, believes that our intellectual decline as a race has much to do with adverse genetic mutations. But human intelligence is suffering for other reasons as well.

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Even by the standards of social media fiascos, this one’s a doozy. On Monday, Burger King’s official Twitter feed announced the chain had been sold to its rival and began posting pro-McDonald’s messages and tales of employee drug use. The strange Twitter activity took place after hackers apparently took control of Burger King’s account and replaced its name and image with the McDonald’s logo. Here is a screenshot of what followers of @burgerking saw on Monday:

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With all the hand-wringing over anonymous commenters and social-media trolls, you’d think the Internet is to blame for all the woes of humanity. After all, what could people do with their ugly, mean thoughts before they had Yelp, Reddit, or Tumblr to help broadcast them? But as far back as the 1840s until the 1940s, they could send them in a Vinegar Valentine. Yes, that’s right. For almost as long as Valentine’s Day has been an insufferably sappy day celebrating romantic love, it’s also been a day for telling everyone else exactly how much you don’t love them—with an anonymous poem sent via post.

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Fun, dubious, privacy-violating stuff happening out in Texas where the Dept. of Motor Vehicles has made a tidy sum selling the information it collects (including names, addresses and makes/models owned) to a variety of private companies. The Texas DMV claims its “top priority” is protecting drivers’ information, but that hardly seems to be the case when it’s pulling in $2.1 million a year selling it off. There are protections in place, but they are flimsy at best.

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On the Heart Attack Grill’s menu and merchandise, Alleman is known as “Patient John.”As the Grill promises, “We prescribe great tasting high-calorie meals including the Double Bypass Burger, Flatliner Fries, Full Sugar Coke, Butterfat Shake, and no-filter cigarettes!” Last year, the restaurant got into the Guinness Book of World Records for building the “most calorific burger” — a 9,982 calorie tower of meat and cheese that could make Takeru Kobayashi consider vegetarianism. And this, people, is why Mike Bloomberg is not the mayor of Las Vegas.

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The first thing about making prison moonshine—or “white thunder”—is, as the prisoner puts it, “You have to have the wine to make the shine.” The Fix has previously reported on how prisoners brew hooch. “It’s just a different process,” our man continues. “Basically, take five gallons of wine and strain it off.” That means getting all the fruit or vegetable pulp out of there: “The potatoes, tomatoes or fruit, whatever you used to make the wine, you want all the heavy chunks of stuff that will burn from the stinger removed so you only have the liquid.” A “stinger” is vital; it’s just a basic heating element with a cord used by inmates to boil water—or any other liquid. With that—plus a five-gallon bucket, some rubber bands, plastic bags, ice, a rubber hose and some pieces from a ripped-up sheet—you’re all set to make your own still.

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Last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a set of voluntary “guidelines” designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit. Ever since, the agency has been mulling whether and how to implement the new program. Meanwhile, the meat industry has been merrily gorging away on antibiotics—and churning out meat rife with antibiotic-resistant pathogens—if the latest data from the FDA itself is any indication. The Pew Charitable Trusts crunched the agency’s numbers on antibiotic use on livestock farms and compared them to data on human use of antibiotics to treat illness, and mashed it all into an infographic, which I’ve excerpted below. Note that that while human antibiotic use has leveled off at below 8 billion pounds annually, livestock farms have been sucking in more and more of the drugs each year—and consumption reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011. To put it another way, the livestock industry is now consuming nearly four-fifths of the antib…

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A Finnish anti-piracy group has copied the design of The Pirate Bay website for their latest anti-piracy campaign. The Pirate Bay is outraged by this move and says it will sue the group for breaking their site policy, which clearly states that organizations are not permitted to steal the site design for nefarious purposes. “People must understand what is right and wrong,” The Pirate Bay says. Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC, known worldwide for tracking down a 9 year-old “pirate girl” and having her Winnie The Pooh laptop confiscated, launched a controversial campaign yesterday. The group copied The Pirate Bay’s design for their campaign site, including the CSS stylesheet, and replaced the logo with one of a sinking ship.

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Research shows sexual acts between any parent and child leads most people to report feeling high levels of disgust, especially women, so the strong reaction to their films is unlikely to be seen as more acceptable over time,” she said. “Some researchers have suggested that erotic images online are so sexually compelling because of the novelty they provide. Since these type of interactions are so rare, and even rarely portrayed, I would expect many people who use erotic images on the internet to find them sexually arousing.”

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The uninitiated may assume that 34-year-old Chevonne Thomas and 31-year-old Osvaldo Rivera were high on so-called bath salts when they took these childrens’ lives. The synthetic meth analog got major bad press last year as the new monster-making killer drug epidemic. But in the big East Coast cities from Boston to Washington, DC, bath salts have barely registered as a blip on the street drug scene. Users here that want a wild drug ride turn to the old standby PCP, despite its reputation for triggering schizophrenia-like states that lead to bizarre episodes of violence. Phencyclidine (scientific name) is a dissociative anesthetic that shuts off certain brain chemicals producing a detachment from reality and states of mind as extreme as mania, delirium and psychosis. It is the most dangerous hallucinogen, never approved for medical use in humans because of its extraordinary side effects. On the street PCP is sold as an oily, liquid base called “wet,” in which either tea or mint leaves…

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The most famous case of Shuar “insolence” occurred in 1599, when the Spanish governor of Maca demanded a gold tax from local Indians to fund a celebration of the coronation of Philip III. The night before the tax was due, Shuar armies slaughtered every adult male in the Spanish hamlets and surrounded the governor’s home. They tied the governor to his bed and used a bone to push freshly melted gold down his throat, laughing and demanding to know if he had finally sated his thirst. According to the Jesuit priest and historian Juan de Velasco, the “the horrendous catastrophe” at Maca caused “insolences and destructions” by the “barbaric nations” up and down the Andean spine of New Spain. For the next 250 years, the Spanish mostly stayed away. Occasional attempts by Jesuit missionaries to reestablish contact were met with a welcome basket of skulls pulled from the shrunken heads of gold-hungry Spaniards.

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TV station hacker warns of zombies in Montana

A Montana television station’s regular programming was interrupted by news of a zombie apocalypse. The Montana Television Network says hackers broke into the Emergency Alert System of Great Falls affiliate KRTV and its CW station Monday. KRTV says on its website the hackers broadcast that “dead bodies are rising from their graves” in several Montana counties. The alert claimed the bodies were “attacking the living” and warned people not to “approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous.” The network says there is no emergency and its engineers are investigating.

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A Florida church has caused outrage by turning away children from its popular Sunday services to cater to a pastor who is a registered sex offender. The decision to allow convicted child molester Darrell Gilyard into the pulpit has angered neighbouring pastors and members of the congregation of the Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist church in Jacksonville. Gilyard, 49, is allowed no contact with minors under the terms of his release from a three-year jail sentence for abusing a 15-year-old girl at another church in 2009. As a result church leaders have made his services “adults only”. Parishioners claim security guards hired by the church have begun refusing admission to families with children, including a woman who tried to attend on Sunday with a two-year-old boy. Instead, they say, children are directed to remain “off site” while Gilyard is preaching, and they accuse the church of dismantling its playground to keep them away.

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Tawny Hickman, 18-year-old babysitter from Fort Pierce, Florida, has been arrested and faces charges of child abuse and battery of a 9-year-old boy. According to a report from the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, the mother of the alleged victim had heard rumors around the neighborhood that “stuff was going on” and contacted local police after she found with hickeys her son’s neck. She said she didn’t want to believe the rumors but had to call 911 once she saw her son’s neck Sunday morning. The young boy told that he awoke in the middle of the night and went in to Hickman’s room “and laid with her.” According to reports Tawny Hickman claimed that she had took someone else’s prescription medication. Once in bed with her, he told police she bit his neck twice. The babysitter had what appeared to be hickeys on her lower stomach are that she says were made by the 9-year-old boy.

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Hale’s account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola’s removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn’t even illegal until 1914 — 11 years after Coca-Cola’s change — but a massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades. During that time, racially oriented arguments about rape and other violence, and social effects more so than physical health concerns, came to shape the discussion. The same hypersexuality that was touted as a selling point during the short-lived glory days of Vin Mariani was now a crux of cocaine’s bigoted indictment. U.S. State Department official Dr. Hamilton Wright said in 1910, “The use of cocaine by the negroes of the South is one of the most elusive and troublesome questions which confront the enforcement of the law … often the direct incentive to the crime of rape …

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Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, has been selling the personal information of Americans to debt collectors and other businesses, according to an NBC News investigation. The Work Number, a company owned by Equifax, maintains “what may be the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal information ever created,” Bob Sullivan of NBC News reported. The database contains 190 million employment records, salary records and health insurance details involving more than 30% of all U.S. adults. And much of this data, including how much people have been paid, is sold to third parties, including bill collectors and banks. “It’s the biggest privacy breach in our time, and it’s legal and no one knows it’s going on,” Robert Mather, who runs a small employment background company named Pre-Employ.com, told the network news web site. “It’s like a secret CIA.”

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Whale vomit is also known as ambergris and is used to make perfume. It is formed in the digestive system of sperm whales and has a very strong and unpleasant aroma. Whales excrete it through the mouth when it is too large to pass through the digestive system. Perfume makers use it as it has a smell similar to musk.

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A particularly nasty new bit of drive-by malware has been discovered trying to extort money from users in Germany by accusing them of viewing child pornography. It’s a horrendous scare tactic to employ, but it’s also one that seems like it could be incredibly effective in deceiving innocent surfers. When confronted with such a horrific accusation, there’s no doubt that some would move quickly to comply in whatever way they were told was necessary.

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Such sites, going back to the infamous IsAnyoneUp revenge site run by Hunter Moore (aka The Most Hated Man on the Internet), are now protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that websites aren’t liable for user-submitted content. Or as Mr. Moore interpreted his legal defense in an interview with BetaBeat’s Jessica Roy: “No one can do sh*t and I don’t give a f*ck.”

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To create a top-of-the-line fake gold bar, one that’s capable of being passed off as a real gold bar (the only kind we think worth making), you need to match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could start off with a tungsten slug about 3 mm smaller in each dimension than the finished gold bar, and then cast a 1.5 mm layer of pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right, it would have a dead ring when knocked (as gold does), it would test right chemically, it would weigh correctly, and it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1.5 mm layer of pure gold being more than enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out that it’s fake.

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The revelation of the Chinese hacking campaign against reporters working for the New York Times has raised awareness of targeted malware attacks, but what does the history of cyberattacks against media agencies look like? Here’s a short (and definitely incomplete) list of some of the stories we have seen over the years, where news agencies have fallen foul of hackers and cybercriminals

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“While many of the pictures were related to the defendant’s duties as yearbook advisor, investigators discovered that he secretly photographed his middle school female students by placing a camera under a table that would record images up the skirts of the female students while they sat in his classroom,” the documents said. The forensic analysis also showed that Hendricks magnified the pictures of students in an effort to enhance the images. Other images show that he took additional photographs and video recordings that attempted “to look down the shirts of female students in his classroom,” the documents said. The forensic examination also turned up evidence that Hendricks had attempted to use a computer technique called “flesh meshing” in an effort to manipulate images of clothed female students in a way that made them appear undressed. The investigators found a document on the computer entitled “How to Use Flesh-mesh X-ray in Photoshop.”

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I am standing chest-deep in a dank, muddy concrete-lined hole in Silver Lake, staring eye-level into a duffel bag full of high-grade drugs. It smells strongly of marijuana – despite the fact that someone sealed it tightly into jars, Ziplocs and professionally vacuum-sealed pouches before THEY HID IT IN MY BACK YARD. I am starting to panic. I already did the full Tex-Avery-wolf AOOOOGAH! upon discovering the mammoth sackful of dope – estimated to be worth somewhere north of $175,000. My jaw already dropped. My eyes already bugged out. Now my heart is thumping my gullet. Breathing is getting iffy. I try to speak. I think my exact words to the solar-panel technician standing equally open-mouthed next to me are something to the effect of “Holy. Fucking. SHIT!”

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Fujitsu’s “privacy mode” is a layer of nearly invisible security that hides missed calls, emails and text messages from contacts designated as private. If one of those acquaintances gets in touch, the only signal of that communication is a subtle change in the color or shape of how the battery sign or antenna bars are displayed. If ignored, the call doesn’t appear in the phone log. The changes are so subtle that it would be impossible to spot for an untrained eye. When the privacy mode is turned off through a secret combination of keys, the concealed calls and messages appear, and voice mail becomes accessible.

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Libraries have been deliberately or accidentally destroyed or badly damaged. Sometimes a library is purposely destroyed as a form of cultural cleansing.[citation needed] There are examples of accidentally destroyed libraries by human actions. Other times they are damaged by natural disasters like earthquakes, floods or accidental fires. Library fires have happened sporadically through the centuries: notable examples are the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the accidental burning of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. Causes vary from arson to the sun’s rays setting fire to leaflets through the action of a magnifying lens in a library in Northam, Devon.

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An undercover cop made a sizable purchase of 140 bags of heroin last Thursday. Standard on the mean streets of Philly, but something was different about these baggies: they were labled “LeBron James“. Yep, The King himself is now officially an endorser of Philadelphia’s finest heroin!